This course provides an overview two of the main empirical
problems that have emerged in the development of models for
meaning composition in natural language, the tradeoffs that are
involved in solving these problems, and some of the different
techniques that have been proposed as solutions. The goal is
twofold: to make students with logic backgrounds aware of the
reasons why the composition of natural language meanings is not
a trivial problem (even though at some levels it might seem that
way), and to familiarize students with linguistics backgrounds
with some of the main alternative techniques for meaning
composition, their similarities and differences, and their pros
and cons. The course will presuppose only a minimal familiarity
with basic grammatical concepts and predicate logic.

An elegant theory of meaning composition for natural language
might be expected to meet the following desiderata, among
others:

-It should respect independently-motivated results of research
on morphology, syntax, and the lexicon.

- It should be grounded in an independently motivated theory of
what lexical meanings are like.
- It should avoid idiosyncratic composition rules to the extent
possible.

- It should be expressible in a sound and computationally
tractable logic.

However, natural language data sometimes make a maximally
elegant theory difficult. Perhaps the best-studied problem for
the meaning composition in this respect has been
quantification. In this course, we will focus on two additional
problems which have driven various kinds of alternative meaning
composition strategies: bare nominals and incorporation on the
one hand, and so-called "intersective"
vs. "nonintersective" modification, on the other. We will
develop a sense of the general nature of the problems these
phenomena pose, as well as a global vision of the issues the
proposed solutions raise.